Solid Cherry Dining Table

This is a solid cherry dining table I made as a low-profit commission for the in-laws. I had some free time in between jobs and they were nice enough to allow me to build a custom dining room table for them. They had been wanting something new for a while, so I went over and talked through the design with my mother in law. From our conversation, I could tell she wanted something a little bit different and unique, but not outrageously weird. Daniel Chaffin’s dining table on the front of FWW Oct 2013 popped into my head. I showed it to her and she loved it. So, off I went.

Final dimensions were about 82” x 41”, and it can seat 8 comfortably (which was one of the primary goals). I made it out of solid cherry, so as you can imagine, multiple glue-ups were done for the top. It is all mortise and tenon joinery, other than the screws that hold the top onto the base. My favorite part of the table is the tapering edges (just the long sides). They were done by cutting a pretty harsh bevel onto the long sides and and then cutting a long smooth curve along the bevel. You can see this is photo 2 the best. The curved and tapering edges are really what makes this piece stand out.

All surfaces other than the underside of the tabletop were sanded to 220. I put about 40 hours of sanding time into this project. Finish was a coat of BLO, then 3 coats of wipe-on poly on the legs, 5 coats of wipe-on poly on the top. I prefinished before doing the final glue-up and was very glad I did.

I am really pleased with how this turned out. It was fun to sit down at our last family gathering and have a nice conversation with family around a table that I made with my own hands. Nothing like it in the world. All in all, I put about 155 hours of work into this table, from rough lumber to delivery. Lots of fun. Hope y’all like it.

First off, looks awesome. That’s a lot of time put into a project and it looks like it paid off in a big way.

I’m building a table with similar dimensions currently so I have some questions.

Are you worried about the top cupping w/o an apron or breadboard?

How many boards comprise your top? Looks like 6 or 7.

How did you joint the broad side of the top boards? How did you edge joint the top boards?

I was going to use a planer sled for the broad side jointing then a straight line rip jig on the table saw for the edge jointing but the length of the boards has me concerned about getting a clean edge joint over the entire length.

Cupping: I am not really too worried about it. There are two rails running across the width underneath the top that support it all the way across up to about 4” from the edge. My hope is that this will keep the whole thing from cupping any noticeable amount. I can tell you that the top had a little flex in it once it was all glued up. Honestly, it seemed like that flex would actually be a good thing because it just conforms to whatever supports it, in this case, the dead straight perpendicular rails and one central parallel rail.

How many boards: 7

Jointing: I assume by broad side, you mean the wide face of the tabletop boards. If that is the case, I actually didn’t joint them, oops… I decided it would be a total waste of time, effort, and wood to try to joint those faces on my measly 6” jointer, so I just planed them. They weren’t perfect when I glued them up, but they were close, and the cauls took care of the rest. I could go deeper here, but I will keep it short: There are times when jointing is just unreasonable, and I felt this was one of them. I DID, however, edge joint the top boards.

Consistent edge, etc. : I think your planer sled for face jointing is really the only way to do this in a home shop. It is extremely difficult to effectively joint a 5/4 piece of wood 8 feet long alone and get good results. The other issue is that by the time you truly joint a face of a 4/4 or 5/4 board that big, how much do you really have left? Unless you have an impeccable board, you may have 3/4 left, and you still haven’t even started planing the other side. Ouch. So, you could face joint, but beware of how much wood you are going to have to remove off of an already thin board to get it truly flat by fine woodworking definition.

Glue line rip: Half of my edges on my tabletop were ripped, once the other edge was jointed. I found it really worked pretty well. Honestly, my limiting factor was my crappy saw blade. With a better blade though, I think it could have been near perfect. You will have to have an outfeed table though, no doubt.